Evaluating Effectiveness and Adequacy of Pakistan Engineering Council (PEC) Contractor Licensing Framework

Abstract

Licensing is a type of occupational regulation (O.R) used by licensing boards of different countries and states to license contractors. Wyoming state was the first to start licensing engineers and surveyors and soon after other states and countries followed. Today majority of countries have some form of licensing requirement for contractors. Pakistan Engineering Council (PEC) also license contractors and consultants since 1976. PEC has updated its licensing requirement multiple times throughout this period using a committee of selected members with almost no contribution from overall construction industry stakeholders/ professionals i.e., contractors, consultants, clients, civil engineers, and academia researchers. Also, many researchers have wondered about the effectiveness and adequacy of licensing requirements for contractors. A two-phase questionnaire survey is conducted to first shortlist and rank the identified licensing objectives and licensing criteria using relative importance index and to later identify the required values for each criteria using SPSS 22, pie charts, and histograms. Cronbach’s Alpha is used to check the reliability of first questionnaire while Chi-square analysis is used to check the significance of second phase results. It was found that the requirement of equipment and machinery, specific number of engineers, engineer’s experience in years, supervisory certificate, and committee decision are redundant requirements and hence should be removed while PEC needs to incorporate the requirement of 2-character references, exam, as well as on average 20% - 30% recommended change in existing requirement values of different criteria. it was also identified that PEC needs to update the existing Professional Credit Points calculation formula as well as suspend licensing process of firms that have 3 litigation cases in process.